Monday, February 06, 2006

Mother of NOW is Past

Betty Friedan, arguably the mother of contemporary feminism, died on Saturday at the age of 85. Ironically, it was just one day before the Super Bowl, a day around which the inheritors of Friedan’s feminine cult movement created the myth that women around the country were suffering domestic violence.

Betty started the whole thing with a book called The Feminine Mystique that she wrote in 1963. In it, she claimed that women suffered from a "nameless, aching dissatisfaction" that she called "the problem that has no name." She based this “research finding” on a survey of her classmates at her college reunion. Thus began the practice by so-called scholars in Women Studies departments in universities around the country of using anecdotal evidence (e.g., surveys not based on statistical sampling methods) to make broad assumptions.

She seemed to evolve from those early beginnings, however. She asserted that women should seek an independent identity but also work with men. She was shunned by her successors at NOW and other major women’s political groups as they adopted their current paranoid delusion of patriarchal “control and oppression.”

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